Watch a football match and there's a 90 per cent chance that you'll see Sutton's face, hewn from granite, glaring directly into your soul from pitchside or from a studio far too small to contain his views.

At this point, it's not even clear that he's meant to be working on half the games he covers; he just turns up. Guys, I just saw the hearse in the car park. You-Know-Who is here.

There is something deeply compelling about the man at work. Sutton is a unique screen presence, all straight-necked posture, knowing glances to camera and gnomic utterances.

Sutton has a strong affiliation with Celtic (Photo by Chris Furlong/Getty Images)

Other pundits have been cruel and aloof – Graeme Souness remains a violently watchable force of nature when piqued – but our man is just so... consistent. No event is too insignificant to be worked into Sutton's algorithm of apoplexy. He is the big data of big opinions.

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This has led some to question Sutton's motivations. To the doubters, he is merely a puppet in the carefully-managed theatre of elite football punditry – a hard-nosed Constable to Alan Shearer's loveable Mr Punch and Robbie Savage's endlessly bleating Judy. (Even the naysayers happily accept that Sutton, like all other football pundits apart from Robbie Savage, is at least minimally qualified to do his job on the basis that he is not Robbie Savage.)

They see in him a man briefed to the eyeballs to spout off any old nonsense, even if it directly contradicts the principles by which he lives.

Sorry, but this clearly misses the point. A large part of Sutton's appeal is the very possibility (read: extreme likelihood) that he is just acting out a character.

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Certainly, it is hard to believe that an ex-pro apparently so consumed by anger could have lain dormant as a public speaker for so long before suddenly emerging, like some battle-ready butterfly, to lay waste to his sport.

Just look at his Twitter feed, characterised by machine-gun retweeting of anything that quotes him and breathless rants filmed in his car, melted stick of Toblerone just out of shot. Look at the way he lowers his microphone between his pontifications, like some swaggering small-town preacher man.

His persona is just too perfect to be real – which is surely the biggest clue that it might not be.

Is Sutton just doing a brilliant deadpan comedy routine? It would not be out of character, judging by a story Graeme Le Saux used to tell about his time with Sutton at Blackburn Rovers.

The details vary across a couple of versions, but the gist is this: Sutton gave Le Saux a lift back from training one day and the latter, out of politeness, invited his team-mate in for a drink.

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Just what does Chris Sutton the man have planned for 'Chris Sutton' the character? The most artistically challenging path, now Sutton has made his name, would surely be a slow withdrawal into brevity. Sutton has already experimented with one-word epithets before ("Poor!" "Abject!" "Meaningless!"), perhaps as a subtle metacommentary on the presidency of Donald Trump.

Like the latter's missives, these seem to come not from the brain but from deep in the gut, like opinions squeezed out of a human-sized toothpaste tube.

But what if he were to take this to the next level, eschewing language altogether and boiling punditry down to a series of primal grunts, groans and whinnies?

Chris Sutton had a spell as manager of Lincoln City (Photo by Pete Norton/Getty Images)

In fact, maybe sound itself is unnecessary; I'm seeing a utopian future in which all analysis – heck, all football on television in general – is just a single camera shot, zoomed in as far as possible, showing Sutton's upper lip, alternately quivering with rage and arching into something that approaches but stops just short of being a rictus grin.

By that stage, it would probably have become clear that the joke was on us. But what a joke it is, ladies and gentlemen. What daring, what straight-faced chutzpah!

A man has turned his very existence into an elaborate Charlie Kaufman plot before our very eyes, for his and our (mainly his) pleasure.

This Valentine's Day, I beseech you to find space in your heart for 'Chris Sutton', football's premier avant-garde performance-art project.

If he didn't exist, someone (actual Chris Sutton) would have had to invent him.